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Central Exchange
Central Exchange is an expansive trading company well known for its slave trading and former position as the dominant force across a large portion of North America. Summary An offshoot of the old United States National Guard, The Central Exchange was born from old-world set themselves up as a service to retain executive independence popularized the trend of capturing stateless bandits alive and assigning them sentences of labor for life. Originally pitched as less bloody and wasteful than the take-no-prisoners alternative, this policy would begin to carry over to petty local criminals and any individual not affiliated with a respected municipality or newborn nation. History Origin in Kansas Four months prior to Square One US Army COL Nathan Abbot had been transferred along with a sizeable regiment of troops to the Fort Riley Installation in Northeast Kansas, supposedly as part of plans to revive the military transition team program under the resident First Infantry Division. At the time leading up to Square One itself many teams had already completed their sixty-day rotation and Abbot was alleged to be in training to assume the role of Post Commander. Riley suffered standard casualties in the Die-Off, as well as the suicide of the Post Commander. In the turmoil Abbot was hurriedly appointed as the new Post Commander by general consensus, assuring his post that they would thrive despite the trauma. Though quelling unrest in the base itself was the first order of business, Abbot also formed two teams to address the world outside, citing their responsibility as soldiers to serve the people as effectively as possible. The first was a team of operator-maintainers tasked with contacting other bases via EMP-proofed HAM equipment. The other was a large company sent east to help secure Fort Leavenworth as a stronghold for National Guard and Army forces addressing the Kansas City-Topeka region. Both teams would succeed, but the operators sooner. Contacting a national guard camp near Tulsa, Army BG David Wilson would be the first to respond. As more bases were reached, more information came to Riley. The Cabinet, Congress, Governors; most were dead or missing, and practically all lines of communication had gone dark in the Blackout. Through the distress the news brought, the leadership assured their staff that their own roles had not changed: restoring order was their job, and they were needed now more than ever. Conversations between base commanders would become largely private after this point, but as Abbot declared the Leavenworth mission a success and pivoted his attention south to Wichita, few people noticed. Bringing order began to take on new meanings as missions grew more complex. Clearing debris and breaking up fights had given way to asset collection, land acquisition, and direct political engagement with the provisional governments of the time. Abbot proposed and executed a barrage of plans dedicated to reconstruction and efficiency that nobody could believe he'd had time to draft, each more elaborate and effective than the last. As each new need developed, Abbot would seemingly uncover the resources to meet it out of the blue, every time. Barely six months after Square One, authority was returning to Topeka, Wichita, and parts of Kansas City. That authority was Fort Riley. Foundation Though the cities hadn't been engulfed in riot for some time, banditry, migration, and infrastructural damage were obstacles East Kansas could not seem to surmount on the trail to full revitalization. Determining the northern protectorates to be stable enough, Abbot arranged for a face-to-face meeting with Wilson halfway between Riley and Tulsa in Wichita. Upon his return, Abbot declared his belief in a new direction for Riley. At a gathering broadcasted throughout East Kansas, Abbot announced his plan to partner with their Oklahoma neighbors in order to pool assets, resources, and infrastructure as the civil service providers to the towns in their respective spheres of influence. Next, he elected to clear the confusion as to where Riley ended and the cities began: referencing the exchange of goods between the cities and his own facilities, as well as export to other parts of the country, he formalized the now-united Kansas and Oklahoma military elements as a private entity that would be called the Central States Exchange (CSE). Finally, he proposed a single solution to soothe the violence of raiders, the food shortages, and the disrepair of facilities: criminals —including those raiders— who would otherwise be killed would be put to work as unpaid laborers. Abbot invited representatives of each town under his care for decorum's sake, and approval was voiced unanimously. In Oklahoma, Wilson hosted a similar exchange. The declaration of the CSE as private turned some heads, but most took it to be mere semantics and the broadcasts passed with little controversy. With the announcement, Abbot and Wilson had freed themselves from municipal accountability, opening a door and setting the groundwork for what would become North America's most extensive faction in the new world. Growth Expansion About two years after Square One the CSE began setting its sights beyond its home on the southeast edge of the Great Plains. CSE reached out to its HAM network of selected contacts and beyond, enrolling dozens of fortresses and commanders with city connections over a matter of weeks. In another two years CSE had posts ranging from the base of the Rocky Mountains to the East side of the Mississippi River Valley, and rebranded as simply "the Central Exchange" (CE). A slew of meetings were called during and following this first registration period, and plans would be drafted to improve and consolidate resource outputs across the whole of current and, they expected, future CE holdings. Over the course of the next decade CE would work to clear and repair major routes between their key sites with dedicated highway and railroad engineers supported by an increasingly massive unpaid prisoner workforce. Early in this process, CE's leadership predicted that 15 years following Square One, they would be able to travel the length of Route 50 without passing through a major town they lacked presence in. Obstacles began presenting themselves, however— not all contacted personnel elected to join. Notable installations like The Pentagon, Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Quantico, and Pendleton turned down every offer. Similarly, some regions remained obstinate in denying trade with the conglomerate, ultimately leaving CE without dominant footholds in the Mid Atlantic, South Florida, Southern California, Appalachia, and swaths of Texas. While not enough personnel could be mustered to establish primacy in these areas, some selected sites and parties who opted not to incorporate could be accounted for: scout platoons were developed and assigned to monitor and in some cases harass or outright sabotage these groups. Early Labor Trade and Market Development During the years of expansion, life in towns with CE presence would see a series of changes originating in the new Prisoner Labor policy. As farms went from dozens of soldiers on duty to a single assigned to keep watch over the detained, personnel for patrols increased immensely, drastically reducing losses from raiding parties and enlarging the surplus of food that could be traded abroad or reserved for drought or migrant influx. The policy proved effective, and many towns —even those without CE presence— began to develop small prisoner workforces of their own, often bought from the Exchange. Noticing the popularity of labor trade, now-CE president Nathan Abbot and vice president David Wilson decided to advance the scope of the practice. Citing corporal punishment common for petty criminals of the time as cruel, CE announced it would replace these punishments with a labor debt system: minor transgressors would instead work off a debt owed to CE and society in the form of a number of days' unpaid labor. Complaints arose soon after, often centered around the number of days assigned to a loved one, but most were quelled or outright ignored as the cities again followed CE policy to maintain profit and a friendly relationship with Exchange depots. Municipal bodies were not the only ones to see the value in trading with the Exchange. Though they had traded in the past with powerful private groups, CE was visited in a rising trend by individuals and small groups scrabbling together the sum of their belongings in order to meet the minimum asset requirement for barter deals. CE quickly noticed a well of untapped opportunity in a lower-cost system, identifying two primary sources of demand: The first, an increasingly wealthy caste grown tired of accepting what their cities saw fit to sell or distribute them out of government trade deals. The second, property owners beyond city limits with even narrower access to buy what the nearest township sent to the market from high-value trades. With a relatively secure and increasingly involved infrastructure, it was decided that heavily-processed mass trades should no longer be CE's limit when it came to incoming goods and interacting with their neighbors. Regulated trades were lucrative ones, however, and CE determined it would need another medium to increase efficiency and flexibility while ensuring bargain accuracy. Determining a currency ought to be developed in order to facilitate complex transactions, CE began distributing "dollar" amounts in the form of simple pressed coins, representative of a number of CE reserve resources (originally oil stored in Tulsa). Simple recruiting and maintenance offices in towns expanded into thriving emporiums as trading exploded, and straightforward, bulk deals between CE and non-members gave way to an intricate economy of small and big buyers and sellers. Many towns, long eager to streamline direct trading among their own populace, began taking on the CE dollar as their own, and although trading across the board boomed, labor trade would remain the staple. Increasing Membership and Cultural Shift Naturally, territorial and economic expansion saw rising head counts. During initial stages of expansion campaigns, new members would consist almost entirely of former US military personnel serving on the bases CE reached out to for enrollment. Bases alone did not bring regional influence though, and steps to diversify were taken swiftly after a commander would sign on. Local militias, small economic unions, and even large raiding parties would be among the groups contacted as potential partners and eventual employees of CE as a means of rapidly developing more comprehensive supervision over vast tracts of land. Enlistment of groups outside of former US civil servants did more than change CE's map, though: its customs changed as well. Despite military posts serving as the headquarters for every "division" CE had partitioned their sphere of influence into, former military personnel became slowly outnumbered among CE agents dispatched to settlements and across the lands. Occasionally formal military forces and hired-on guns would come to blows over who belonged and "what it meant to be a part of CE", eventually prompting a response from the leadership. Determining forward progress was contingent on further hires outside of the military remnants, Fort Riley urged regional heads to begin cycling spare parties in and out of bases, ease up on discipline, and phase out obsolete jargon and traditional martial practice. The changes would be mostly cosmetic: CE had, for some time, barely bothered to maintain its initial pretense as a service corps among its own personnel, and the noble goal for most had shifted from reconstruction for all to ensuring the CE's progress and their position within it. This club mentality was beneficial, but its basis had to lie in the present rather than the past. Future affiliation with CE needed to be enticing and easy, and would be: it would not be long before general recruitment offices opened in major trade posts and those who felt to complain about tradition were lost among scores of new, more eager, personnel. Old fashioned formality and discipline would ebb more with time, and although the chain of command still saw strict enforcement, productivity became the enshrined principle. CE's attachment to the image of the soldier dissolved as the economic hub of Tulsa replaced Fort Riley as headquarters. Hints of the army origins remained in simplified basic training procedures and semi-standardized uniforms, but behavioral infractions would rarely meet with reprimand – often towns had little power to make demands of CE. The new business-first CE was far more flexible in infrastructure and action, and future prospects never looked brighter as they began to close the line between the coasts. Peak Years Labor Trade Intensification Setting the pace for the new world was a hard-earned responsibility and, Tulsa feared, an easily lost one. Though CE was handily the most influential outfit 25 years after Square One, others had started making themselves known in the meantime. While CE had dealt with plenty of minor interlopers before, its first true economic rival came in the remnants and claimants of the American empire in the revived United States government. Resource-rich and similar in origin, the USA had secured an industrial network along the East coast and begun to absorb inland settlements by the time CE started seriously working on connecting Tulsa to the Atlantic. The Exchange rushed projects to controlled ports Charleston and Jacksonville and considered their options. Loyalists to the US proved difficult to convert and Washington benefited from the same labor trade the Exchange did. The US, however, had a penchant for the cordial and a complex legal system, and still covered less ground. Determining their size and flexibility gave them an edge over the US when it came to their core specialty, Tulsa motioned to enhance the labor trade. Noting the success of provincial practices in the lower Midwest and Mississippi river valley, leadership aimed to imitate the systems across the breadth of their holdings and secure a permanent lead over the US. CE started by pressing most of their major trading partners to sign into law what had largely been the de facto practice already– CE posts did not need to disclose acquisition reports to the jurisdictions they operated within. For the sake of the labor trade there was a purpose to this beyond dodging material accountability: the Exchange was officially no longer obligated to share prisoner trade records, including those regarding sentence duration. Little changed for gentry, chambers of commerce, and trade-dependent local governments, but a substantial pushback came from standard farmers and townspeople supplying the workforce. Mercantile and capital elite subdued the physical unrest easily enough, but the Central Exchange had earned a new title among the objectors: slavers. Scuffles with disgruntled civilians became more common, and rare exchanges with vigilante posses only earned greater antagonism from CE agents stationed outside bases. While the unrest drew some complaints from the authorities housing trade posts, Tulsa could typically leverage goods for faith. An ideological gulf had become obvious, however, and soon CE would weather the first round of consequences among their own ranks. Some of the more dutiful and old-fashioned posts had grown critical of their leadership's increasingly lax definitions of timekeeping, criminal offenders, and acceptable members and made it known through –at first minor– acts of defiance. Numerous bases disregarded new policies and argued with Tulsa over transfers and lenient hire practices, with some going as far as to stockpile resources off the record and undercut CE's bottom line. Upon Tulsa's discovery of this embezzlement the schism between what was seen as CE's roots and future came to a boil. President Abbot personally threatened to sever the lucrative Rock Island Arsenal Army Base west of Chicago if they refused to forfeit their withheld goods. Rock Island demanded a policy rollback or threatened their own willful defection. Wounded by the flippant response, Tulsa warned they would in fact intensify their new practices and take what was theirs by force should Rock Island refuse to comply– the answer was silence. Furious to be disrespected, Tulsa intended to make good on their promises and sent word to nearby Camp Dodge in Iowa. Dodge was to form a task force company dedicated to assaulting the position on Rock Island and apprehending individuals found outside the Davenport jurisdiction at random. While CE's first official siege was a short-lived and passive failure, the operatives did fulfill their other duty. Starting with an independent convoy community, CE soldiers rounded up nearly 100 unregistered people from the roads and yeoman farms in the immediate area. Those with connections in town or to distinguished names were released swiftly, but those without were held, and their detachment from anyone of repute highlighted to demonstrate a point to Rock Island: The Exchange had drawn order from the random and made workers out of the wanderers and wayward. CE did not change Rock Island's minds, but would once again bring great changes to their own forces. Concerned inquiries over the Rock Island scenario began piling up in Tulsa but leadership maintained the correctness of their actions. Tulsa issued numerous statements of defense until Abbot hosted a broadcast addressed to all posts repeating the attitude expressed at Rock Island. The message proved controversial and while a number of posts threatened their own secession, the leaders of many agreed that failing to meaningfully engage in progress and rebuilding the country was a disservice to both others and oneself. Shortly after the broadcast, posts across New Orleans unexpectedly and violently withdrew, effectively ending CE presence in the city. The action distressed many but made the schism, and the urgent need for a solution, only more clear. Tulsa decided to double down. Blaming New Orleans on the work of a handful of agitators, Tulsa mandated harsher punishments for agents and laborers alike caught proselytizing or engaging in any serious ideological discussion or action not explicitly sanctioned by the leadership. Quelling dissent, though, was not proving the superiority of Tulsa's methods, and Abbot still had a point to to make. and Abbot forewarned trusted commanders before green lighting roundups of the unaffiliated across all CE posts. As expected the decision was controversial, but CE's shift in image and principle from moral to professional paid off and diminished internal conflict immensely. Some minor posts were lost and it became clear they would not soon control a number of cities as completely as they did Tulsa, but the gamble ended up providing them with more economic latitude than ever: who could be incarcerated and inducted into the labor trade was redefined on a whim, and the other powers that be mostly shrugged it off. Authority Through bargaining power and a careful but steady march towards bald-faced slave trade, CE had ingratiated itself to the needy powerful and given them space to paint each more atrocious act as another characteristically bold move by the new world's trailblazers. What influential groups hadn't been outright absorbed almost inevitably did business with them, among them the USA, who by around 30 years after Square One extensively hosted CE trade posts and cut deals to share infrastructure with the group (though registered US civilians were not to be taken indiscriminately). In contrast, popularity with the masses had taken a rockier course. Decades-old stories of the early and seemingly altruistic years in Kansas sounded far-fetched to the millions now living, in some way or another, under the shadow that Tulsa cast. Reliance on CE networking had laid the new economic foundations of settlements across the old US and the labor trade they modeled and dominated was nearly ubiquitous in the agricultural production that was feeding a recovering civilization. That living at all meant supporting CE's income had soured many to the increasingly despotic organization, and even though the group had rarely reported their work to the general populace since privatizing, the signs of their involvement were widely understood– from market tampering to missing neighbors. It was not lost on Exchange leadership that they in turn would not have the power they did without widespread participation, and although their size was unmatched, care had to be taken to maintain their clientele. For this reason, alleged harvest of only the criminal and unaffiliated was maybe the most critical aspect of the slave trade. Politically, even those very loose roundup criteria were often enough for dependent leaders to defend CE and remind people that they did have some standards. Furthermore, though, the rules kept avenues of support for victims limited, lessening societal risks of participation for entities private and public alike. Bearing wounds from raiders past and present, communities often weren't too hard to turn against effectively characterized lawbreakers, and local offices could adjust sentences to prevent anyone too popular from being sent to labor. Outsiders fared worse: by definition unattached, they lacked any method or even possibility of mounting an organized defense against the roundups, and while some of the ruling class wagged their fingers at the routine there was little they felt compelled to do if nobody was left on the outside to object. Others worked with Tulsa to sanitize the practice's origins, directing blame at the bandits on Rock Island and thugs in New Orleans for prompting the manhunts; if the puritans at the traitorous posts wished to see an end to the system they vehemently protested, they would return their goods to the rightful owners. Otherwise CE would only have more hands to get work done. Not everybody accepted the justifications. The polite were content to charge the turncoats, but a growing crowd of the disgruntled exalted the defectors. Rock Island, now mostly ignored by CE except for saber-rattling, was to some a romanticized vision of civil military tradition standing against the material engine consuming their world. Meanwhile New Orleans, which was not at all ignored, became proof that the Exchange could be thrown off– a thriving port crucial for true control of the Mississippi that Tulsa couldn't seem to take back. The two posts were only part of a problem forming for the Exchange. The ex-CE posts that hadn't dissolved, turned to banditry, or incorporated into municipal garrison, had embraced new ideology in factions long growing in the margins. Some found meeker but more communal roles in relatively small players like the United Soldiers' Movement (USM) and Great Basin Nations (GBN), while others soldiered for spiritual and transcendent purposes in groups like the Followers of Poemandres. Like before, the withdrawn agents signaled to a larger shift in sentiment. Provided they were able in circumstance and constitution, many did what they could to sign on with outfits whose principles often found them crossing CE, while others not even involved spread gossip and rumors of defiant acts, heroic skirmishes, and enlightened creeds. The veneration was not simply contenting; emboldened, some towns began organizing to support and even invite intervention, openly calling for insurrection against their own governments, The Exchange, and their enablers. While local law was often able to put down these demonstrations, the drama and violence prompted serious complaints from the upper class. Rounds of threats to drop CE in favor of less controversial partners troubled Abbot, and once again Tulsa went on the offensive to secure the future. Promising an end to the tumult for their urban partners, CE outlined a course of action reliant on deplatforming the opposition and then breaking their faith in the groups that inspired them. CE requested cooperation and access (in private) to any town records and purges were arranged with the aim of looking random and unassociated to Tulsa and their partners. Freelancers were contacted by incognito CE agents and provided with information and sometimes even tools to kill major orators promoting disobedience. Though they varied between single killers and gangs who employed different methods at different locations it hardly mattered: when the murders began, most agreed that Abbot was the one pointing the gun. The killings worked for the most part, but the while street preaching, rallies, and worker actions had slowed to a halt, violent skirmishes with posses aiming to take a more direct stance increased. CE responded in kind by transferring rural agents to urban posts, and ordering all active in the field to prioritize pursuing and killing opposition. For the first few months the battles played out even-handedly, but CE's superior funding and political support were soon proven to be too much for most impromptu vigilantes to handle. Infuriated and emboldened by nudging from Tulsa, CE agents began taking things beyond simple killing. Corpses would not be found where they had fallen, but dismembered on busy streets or hanged from lamps or overpasses. The message was clear and though the culprits were obvious, the fear instilled by increasingly violent demonstrations was accomplishing the goal of whittling the dissenting spirit. The displays did nothing to help CE's public image, but Tulsa had begun to abandoned hopes of common appeal in favor of catering to the powerful and forcing the rest into submission. Many towns even relaxed their law enforcement spending as Exchange agents tended to keep the public afraid of disobedience and, in the case that didn't work, draw fire first. This wasn't good enough, though: as CE's power grew, so did Tulsa's frustration with elements that had the audacity to challenge them. Abbot had grown immensely frustrated with the effects while many turned their noses at the spectacle, over time some became resigned to the idea that one was bringing it on themselves when they took on the Exchange a